Update (12-10-2010) – So today I’m not the Firefox fanboy I used to be.  I’ve moved into Chrome.  Check out Chrome Extensions That Make SEO Easier.

The Firefox browser is an amazing, innovative browser.  It’s fun watching IE copy its features (well, as many as its architecture can allow, which isn’t many – MS doesn’t rebuild, so Firefox should be enjoying their notoriety for a long time to come).  I was an early adopter, but it’s pretty amazing how many people use this browser now – it’s not just advanced web surfers anymore.  I was helping my 60 year old mother install a webcam and saw the Firefox browser.  Impressed, I asked her how she heard about it.  She said, “well, I don’t want Spyware.”  Wow.

For those who still don’t use Firefox, here’s some reasons you should take the plunge.  If you’re a traditional IE user, believe me, learning this browser is a piece of cake.

1. Download Manager makes controlling and revisiting your downloads easier
2. Faster – uses less computer resources
3. Smart Location Bar – this makes entering URLs easier
4. Great privacy controls
5. Security!!!!!!!!! <- reason enough to choose Firefox over IE
6. Better webpage rendering
7. Zoom in on text and images (cntrl +/-)
8. HUGELY customizable

That last one is a big one (and the reason for this post).  With hundreds of homemade Firefox extensions on the web, you can customize your browser to make your internet life easier.  If you’re a web developer, there are extensions to help you locate and analyze code, view pages in cross-browser emulation, disable style codes or JavaScript, and a lot more.  If you are a social media fanatic, there are extensions that make your browser interact with your favorite sites more naturally.  It’s pretty addictive to search for these extensions, especially if you’re a tinkerer like me.  Here’s a bunch including ad blockers, tab controllers, image viewers, and cool ways to save pages for easier use later (I haven’t used my browsers bookmark function in a while thanks to some of these plugins).

How does Firefox help Googling?

Greasemonkey is a Firefox Extension that allows for sub-extensions (called scripts, also found by Googling ‘greasemonkey scripts’ or something similiar).  Search Engine Journal just posted 14 Essential Greasemonkey Scripts for Google Searching, and had a few I didn’t know about.  Some of these scripts are useful to the average searcher.  They do a great job of summarizing each script, so take a look.

To use these scripts, you just have to install the Greasmonkey extension first, then go to the script pages and click INSTALL.  That couldn’t be easier.

How does Firefox help SEO?

There are plenty of Firefox extensions for search engine optimization, allowing for quick site audits, spider emulation, NoFollow checkers, user-agent switchers (view a site as Google), and code viewers.

Again, these sites do a great job describing and sending you to the tools.  Tackle these after lunch for an hour, and I guarantee the web will look a lot better.  Enjoy -

http://seo2.0.onreact.com/top-10-firefox-extensions-for-search-website-optimization-and-seo-i-use

http://tips.webdesign10.com/firefox-seo-extensions

http://www.automaticable.com/2008-04-29/the-top-12-seo-firefox-extensions/

Update!

This is now in full release on Google.  You need to be logged into Google to see it.  It’s called SearchWiki.  Google reps have said that your personal reordering of listings doesn’t affect the natural search at this time.  This is valuable user data though, so I would expect Google to start considering this.  Google doesn’t work as hard as they do to collect user data, only to not eventually use it in their products!  What better product than Google search?  They just need to figure out how to keep it from being artificially manipulated by black-hats and spammers.

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A few posts ago I talked about the lucky coworker who got the Google social search beta.  Well, today the Google fairies smiled upon me.  I created a new Google account for a project I was working on, and a webmaster central account, and BOOM… there it was in all its glory.

I quickly downloaded some screen capture software and put together this video.  Sorry, no sound, but I don’t think you’ll really need it to see what this cool Google interface is all about.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSdPfbXTnI8

I’ve been spending my last year working in an agency in Philadelphia.  I don’t get out nearly as much as I used to, and as a result, was totally oblivious to this great group of local interactive marketers.  I hope to meet them soon.  My new friend Chris Phillips invited me to the Internet Marketers of Delaware Valley.  Affiliated with that is Search Camp Philly, a great sounding weekend for $21.00.  Wow.  I might have to leave Disney World early for that.  Wife would kill me though…

I don’t feel so alone anymore!  I know I have a couple local readers to my new blog.  Definitely check this out.

“The search landscape is evolving” – sure, we hear that everyday in this industry, but when you log on to Google, it’s hard to drink the Kool-Aid.  I have to admit, I think I’m finally starting to feel the “hype” thanks to some inspiriting things from the Yahoo camp.  When Yahoo said they were going to “Open Up”, I didn’t think they’d kick the barn doors open this wide, this fast.  This is exciting.  On the heels of SearchMonkey, Yahoo recently announced BOSS, another component of their “Y!OS”, or Yahoo Open Strategy.   I think vertical / social engines are finally going to get their 15 minutes, and I couldn’t be happier. (more…)

So there’s noise that Google’s going to buy Digg.  Is this breaking news?  Not really, unless you consider “breaking news” anything as old as March.  But the rumor part seems to be becoming less of a rumor according to TechCrunch .  A few days ago, news about a signed letter of intent started to circulate:  Google will aquire for $200 million-ish .  Like most engines, acquiring is part of Google’s big plan.  Monetizing these services with ads typically follows.  With Digg, this might be the biggest purchase yet in terms of mindshare (the previous winner being YouTube, but this was a bit befor YouTube was the bohemeth it is now).  Google bought Picasa, Blogger, Writely, and several others.

Digg uses Microsoft now for ads.  I’m not sure if they’re still using Federated Media in conjunction.  Obviously, MSN gets pushed out of the plan when Google steps in.  Plus, Google will likely start importing its other products and technology into Digg.  My question is, on the heels of my last post about Google’s social interface (that’s now testing), how much of Digg will go into Google’s search engine?  Is there technology that Google can leverage, or is it just simpler for Google’s engineers to develop it themsleves than shape to fit?  Maybe the Digg brand is the real driver.  When you think of social in any sense, you think of Digg (definitely not Orkut).

I think it all sounds pretty, well, normal, but I hate to see the purity of Digg disappear.  It’s a little like a big business swallowing up a pioneer, like record labels did with the Sex Pistols, or Wawa did with my favorite corner store.  No matter what good comes from the big, new, shiny neighbors, some of the charm is gone in this independent social-space neighborhood.

A little bittersweet for me, I guess.

Image from web connoisseur.com

A couple people in the agency were blessed by Google today.  They got to try out a new social-driven interface.

This could be huge.

We knew Google was coming with something like this.  Once you’re logged in with a google account, you’ll have the options to remove listings you don’t like, change the orders, voting, add comments, and more.  PLUS – there’s a link that you can see how OTHER people organized the search for themselves.  Sound like tags.

Will the voting affect the natural search?  I have to think it might… since Google always says they’re about recommendation signals.  But would a thumb’s down hurt your rankings?

I also have to think that the traditional relevancy will stay very important to Google.  They put too much stock into their algos, and this kind of social search could be gamed.  But looks like the SEO 2.0 philosophy is going to start paying off.

More on TechCrunch.

As SEO takes the (long) corner, and the web matures, there’s always going to be a need for reshaping.  SEO has a funky name in some circles, mostly from those who lump all the bad in with the good. To me, the things that really stood out about SEO were the connections it could make to people who are specifically looking for connections, and the idea of actually helping engines be more, well, human.  Humans helping robots helping humans.  It’s not as noble as DMOZ or Mahalo, but stands to work much, much better.

So last year, as SEO 2.0 started to make some noise, and the basic concepts started to bubble up, I was hooked. I took it to my agency. I define my consulting around it. I adore sites like seo2.0.onreact.com (who in true SEO 2.0 spirit are bringing the SEO community together with requests for definitions) who work at getting this new philosophy out into the SEO space. Maybe one day fewer people will look at SEO less as spamming, or a ‘throw darts at a map’ tactic, and more as an actual attempt to improve user value legitimately, and bringing to life the legend of storybook search engine goals.

Wiep is a cool blogger.  About a year ago he experiemented on his SEO blog with something I was intrigued by.  He linked to a Matt Cutts blog post that was playing with the spammy phrase buy cheap viagra online to make a point.  The post wasn’t exactly optimizing for this term – Matt was using it as a sample, and other commenters were having fun with it.  In the end, the phrase was repeated several times.  In Wiep’s post, Trust + keywords + link = Good ranking (or: How Matt Cutts got ranked for “Buy Cheap Viagra from a year ago, he noticed this, and decided to link to the page in his blogroll with that exact phrase as his anchor text.

Damned if Matt Cutts didn’t briefly rank third for buy cheap viagra online.  Briefly.

I remembered this post because Wiep followed up on this post – Viagra Link Test: One Year Later.  Looks like the ranking is back.

The basics of SEO sort of explain this.  Authoritative sites, with trust, reputation, etc., and PR from external sources gave Matt this ranking.  But where’s the relevancy?  What about those other 200+ factors that we webmasters/SEOs don’t know about?  They don’t seem to be in play here, unless there’s something about Matt Cutts and Viagra that we don’t know about either.

Maybe this is isolated to a small percentage of fringe cases, but with all the webspam out there still (even though it has gotten much better in my opinion), you’d think Google would have this sort of catch for this.  Something’s clearly not working.  In the original experiment, one link pushed this ranking to #3.  Now, with at least one current link still to this page, is this really enough PR to rank the term?  Does this mean external links might just have too much power?

I remember rumors of Page Rank being devalued even more.  I forget where I heard it.  It was months ago.  I thought it was a good idea, and this experiment reinforces it.  Trim back the external, and maybe turn up the internal.  Here’s why I think this:

1.  Link Spam, which is now out of hand with all the other spam , could drop.  So should bad link bait, comment spam, and pay-per-posts.  Ugh.  This won’t be going away as social media just gets bigger – nope, the reverse will happen.

2.  Engines would be forced to retune their overall algorithms, instead of putting thumbs in the dyke (hey, Microsoft – this isn’t working for Windows, either, by the way…).  I think a retuning could lead to a whole new property value.  I think the web is just about done with Google 1.0, and demanding Google 2.0.  It’s going to happen, so let’s get to it.

3.  Engines could get more semantic.  If they’re ever going to start serving human language outside of the box, they need to start reading human language.

4.  Speaking of human – the human element may come into play even more than before (c’mon Google, you can afford it… I’m not talking Mahalo, but kick up the hand-work a few more notches, if only to catch these kinds of algorithmic slip-ups).

5.  Not all webmasters are SEOs (most of them aren’t) – they’re trying to create sites that are user aimed, even if they’re not exceptionally good at it.  So giving extra attention to internal linking efforts in order to show the pages that webmasters think are good.  Aside from the splogs/trash affiliate sites, etc., most spam tactics are outside of internal linking.  Even if they start to spam internally, Google algorithiims should still be able to discount thin value.

With the surprise news that Adobe hooked Google and Yahoo up with a special reader for the spiders (which allows the engines to parse the .swf files and index/follow deeper content), does that mean the SEO’s PE special weapon can be abandoned?

I’m still going to stick with it for a while for my SEO blog and my clients’ sites. Google is adopting the reader first, and has technically been lightly reading some flash files already, but anyone who’s been in the game long enough knows that a lot of these properties launch with half-powered products all the time. Their track record isn’t stellar, so why not a ‘better safe than sorry’ approach?   I don’t think I would consider dropping PE until at least a few more months after MSN jumps aboard.  I’m not sure I would cease building products for the PE method (depending on the cost vs. value), and simple on-page coding is so easy – it seems like a no-brainer.

What about the other engines that will never be this advanced?  Do you care about them?  In preperation for vertical and social searching, I think it’s wise to consider what they could become.   I think this news is going to spark a huge influx of flash sites, but I’m thinking this still seems like a bad idea.

I’m a movie geek. I like the classics, I like arty flicks, and I like zombie movies. But one of my all-time favorites is Chinatown. It’s perfect fiction, perfect storytelling, and amazing cinematic atmosphere. Jake is a the original ‘persistent nebbish P.I.’ who gets into something pretty twisted. If I wasn’t doing SEO for a living, I would seriously consider being a private investigator.

I can’t complain too much. Keyword research is fun.  It’s the closest to private investigator I’ll ever get, and with so many avenues, the challenge never goes away.  Finding that one special keyword/keyphrase that kicks the barn doors open is pure joy.  Planting it and letting it sprout into other traffic strains is even more fun. I may not get to put a cheap stopwatch under a tire, but I do get to scout scout (or eavesdrop?) in social networks to learn what people are saying. Some of my greatest keywords have come from this “investigation”.

Here’s my favorite moves:

1. Analytics – Analytics is so much more valuable than most companies know.  It’s more than just recording data and providing reports.  It’s an absolute goldmine of insight, and is my number one starting point for most creative SEO excursions.  In this case, tracking your inbound links from social networks, and really getting into the traffic-sending conversations, can be a major eye-opener.  Don’t be afraid to jump in and stimulate replies.
2. Social Alerter – A great new program, Social Alerter, does for a few social properties as Google Alerts does for the whole web.  For Digg, Del.Icio.Us, Mixx, and Propeller comments and posts, this tool works nicely.
3. Google Alerts – Speaking of Google Alerts, it’s a classic tool to track site / brand messages.  Look for some keywords (or inspiration) with this.
4. Tweet Volume – If you have some keywords that could be unique, and want to see how they are passed around int Twitter, try Tweet Volume.

Also, just searching and browsing in social networks for your brand or topic, and paying special attention to the tags as inspiration, will do more than just collect keywords.  It will help you collect opinions, get inspired, and really connect with your visitors/customers, so you don’t get your nose cut.